Eleanor Clift let the mask drop for a moment on this week’s McLaughlin Group, of which I caught the Sunday-morning rerun. They don’t have a transcript up yet, but she said something close to this: “Hillary’s appealing to seniors and working-class whites. That is the electorate of yesterday. He [i.e. Obama] is appealing to the electorate of tomorrow.

It’s interesting to parse that. Her point about seniors being the electorate of yesterday I suppose has some force. The thing about seniors is, they won’t be with us much longer.

What does it mean, though, to assert that the white working class is “yesterday’s electorate”? Are they, like seniors, going to disappear from the national scene? Why? Because we don’t need a working class any more? But how does that square with the claims by open-borders folk like Eleanor that we need masses of unskilled, uneducated immigrants to do the jobs Americans won’t do? Apparently we do need a working class; it’s just not right that white Americans should be part of it, and in any case they don’t want to be.

The most charitable interpretation I can put on this way of thinking goes somewhat as follow.

Working-class occupations — those that don’t require much book learning, and / or involve getting your hands dirty, and / or you don’t have to wear business dress to — should not be done by population groups who have been here a few generations. They should be reserved to immigrants. The immigrants will in due course assimilate. Their children and grandchildren will seize the marvelous opportunities offered by U.S. society. They will become lawyers, doctors, and entrepreneurs. Those undesirable working-class jobs will be filled by new tranches of poor, grateful immigrants.

(The uncharitable interpretation would be that Eleanor doesn’t like working-class white people. That, of course, is impossible!)

O.K., but if the paragraph above is a correct picture of the liberal worldview, I have a number of questions.

  1. There is a distribution of intelligence, ability, and aptitude for book learning in the white-American population, as there is in any large population. Tens of millions of white Americans have no aptitude for, or interest in, elite occupations. They could live happy and useful lives doing blue-collar jobs. Why should that life chance be denied them? I understand, Eleanor, that you enjoy your job as a symbol manipulator, with work activities centered around reading, writing, and speaking. Not everybody is like that, though. Why should not people whose satisfaction is to fix things, or make things, or build things — why should not they have life opportunities, too? Even if they are white?
  2. African Americans have been here for a good many generations. As is the case with their white fellow-citizens, millions of them do not want to enter overclass occupations, and could not even if they wanted to. Why should working-class occupations be denied to them?
  3. The Great Wave of 1880s-1920s immigrants did indeed assimilate wonderfully well into U.S. society. They were assisted by the Great Pause in immigration from 1924 to 1965, though. Should we have another Great Pause to let the 1965-2008 flow assimilate?
  4. Immigrants of the Great Wave had some peculiar mass characteristics. They were, for example, linguistically diverse, yet overwhelmingly European and Christian or Jewish. Can we, from the Great Wave experience, make good predictions about the assimilability of an immigrant population that is much less diverse linguistically, while being much more diverse in ethnicity and religion?
  5. This process you seem to have in mind, of immigrants flowing in to do dirty jobs while the children and grandchildren of previous immigrants rise into the professions and the overclass: Do you envisage it continuing into the indefinite future? To a U.S. population of a billion and beyond? Can you entertain the possibility that it might have a malign effect on our environment? Our political life? Our social tensions? And with fertility rates plummeting all over the world, what if the immigrant supply dries up?
  6. What do the American people at large think of your notion? Does it matter what they think?